Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Zerofootprint Toronto

I see that the City of Toronto has initiated a new project called "Zerofootprint Toronto."  This is a collaborative effort between the City government and a Canadian nonprofit organization called "Zerofootprint," located in Toronto. 

The idea behind this project is to create a municipality-focused means for all residents and businesses to compute their own carbon footprints, and, in the process, incrementally build a picture of the carbon footprint of the city as a whole.  This is a unique approach to carbon footprints -- there are numerous footprint calculators available online, but this is the only resource that is specifically designed to aggregate the results of individuals within a city.  So the idea seems to be to make this tool available to everyone in Toronto, where they can register for an account and login to get access to the carbon footprint calculator.  As a result, the calculator does what most carbon calculators are designed to do, that is, to elevate peoples' awareness about how much carbon they are responsbile for.  But here the information helps the city to understand the footprint of the city as a whole. See the City's web description of the project at Zerofootprint Toronto.

ZeroFootprint is a nonprofit organization that offers this type of project to individuals, municipalities, businesses, and a wide array of other organizations, including schools, generally.  It was founded by Ron Dembo, a Canadian businessperson who founded and ran a company called Algorithmics.  Zerofootprint's Executive Director is Deborah Kaplan.  Check its web site for a more complete look at what Zerofootprint does.

Obviously, cities have other ways of estimating their carbon footprints (see my other postings on the subject).  How useful will this project be?  I suspect that it will be useful in raising peoples' awareness. I wonder whether it will provide city officials with any new information or insights about the city's carbon footprint.  What do you think?  Will it help the cause of reducing carbon emissions. Will the information gather from Zerofootprint Toronto aid in the city's carbon inventory process?  Is this the kind of project that might work in your city or town?  Let me know what you think.

OECD Metropolitan Review of Sustainability in Toronto

I recently had the pleasure of joining a team from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), headquartered in Paris, for the purposes of conducting an invited assessment of metropolitan Toronto's economic and sustainable development strategies.  The team, made up of a stellar group of people from the US, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, consisted mainly of professional and academic economists. Although everyone on the team had at least some familiarity with the idea of smart growth and sustainability, I was explicitly asked to focus on the sustainable development aspects of Toronto's efforts to become a global city. 

The team spent a full five days meeting with metropolitan Toronto municipal, provincial, and national government officials, as well as nonprofit leaders and representatives from the business community.  The team is now in the process of preparing a final report that is planned for some time in December. 

I was truly impressed with what Toronto and its surrounding cities have accomplished in terms of trying to become more sustainable.  Toronto is a large city (2.5 million people) in a metropolitan area of about 5 million, with several surrounding cities of 700,000 people or more.  These cities face similar challenges as other cities in North America as they try to find ways of managing growth without damaging the environment, including precipitous increases in the volume of traffic. Despite this, some of Toronto's programs include a very aggressive effort to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon, its long-term commitment to transit oriented housing and urban villages, and many others.  (See the separate posting on Toronto's collaborative effort with ZeroFootprint)  The city is embarking on Mayor Miller's "Tower Renewal Project" to upgrade the energy efficiency of the hundreds of highrise residential buildings in the city.  The city runs a "district cooling system" that uses cold water from deep in lack Ontario to cool downtown office buildings, including city hall.  I could go on and on and on, but when the OECD report comes out in December, it should contain a comprehensive review of what the city and region are doing to try to become more sustainable.

What is your sense of Toronto's sustainability efforts?  How does it stack up against other Canadian cities that are committed to sustainability, especially Vancouver?  I'd love to hear from you about what Toronto does well and what it needs to improve on.